[In the following essay, Clive argues that Gibbon's frequent use of humor in the Decline and Fall was meant, above all else, to show his readers that the advance of civilization is fashioned more by practical concerns than by imagination or speculation.]

Oliphant Smeaton, editor of the “Everyman” Decline and Fall, speaks of “those silly witticisms as pointless as they are puerile in which Gibbon at times indulges.”¹ How would the great historian have dealt with that comment and its author? The latter's name, though the mere act of pronouncing it may even now raise a smile, would not have lent itself to punning—unlike that of the Abbé le Bœuf, “an antiquarian, whose name was happily expressive of his talents.”² But his censorious remark might have moved Gibbon to credit him with “that naïveté, that unconscious simplicity, which always constitutes genuine humor.”³

To take issue with Oliphant Smeaton is neither to deny that any historian who admits the comic spirit to his pages puts strict historical truth at risk, nor to maintain that Gibbon's humor demands to be treated with reverence and awe. To be sure, he had learned from Pascal the art of wielding “grave and temperate irony” in a great cause. But it did not require the excesses of the early Christians to set free his sense of farce and his ability to indulge in what, writing of Bayle, he referred to as “wicked wit.”⁴ Delinquent authors sufficed. For evidence one need look no higher than his footnotes, which in themselves constitute a veritable academy of raillery and humor. Voltaire is a favorite target, casting, as he does, “a keen and lively glance over the surface of history.”⁵ Thus, “unsupported by either fact or probability, [he] has generously bestowed the Canary Islands on the Roman empire.”⁶ As a Gibbonian victim, the Patriarch of Ferney duly takes his place alongside Ammianus Marcellinus, whose bad taste is such “that it is not easy to distinguish his facts from his metaphors”; Salmasius, who “too often involves himself in the maze of his disorderly erudition”; St. Augustine, “[whose] learning is too often borrowed, and … [whose] arguments are too often his own”; and Corneille, whose tragedy of Heraclius “requires more than one representation to be clearly understood; and … after an interval of some years, is said to have puzzled the author himself.”⁷

Sex and Christianity are conventionally mentioned as two of the principal arenas in which Gibbon's wit disported itself to the fullest, and there is little reason to dispute that judgment. Like Theodora's murmurs, pleasures, and arts, some of Gibbon's anecdotes involving sexual matters “must be veiled in the obscurity of a learned language.”⁸ And so we hear of Lycopolis, the modern Siut, or Osiot, which has a very convenient fountain, cujus potû signa virginitatis eripiuntur.⁹ At other times, a learned language is not required; for instance, when Gibbon describes Claudius as the only one of the first fifteen Roman emperors “whose taste in love was entirely correct”; or when he reports that Arius reckoned among his immediate followers “two bishops of Egypt, seven presbyters, twelve deacons, and (what may appear almost incredible) seven hundred virgins.”¹⁰ No essay about Gibbon's humor may omit the younger Gordian: “Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.” The footnote reads: “By each of his concubines, the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions were by no means contemptible.”¹¹

The combination of sex and Christianity seems to be particularly effective in triggering Gibbon's risibilities. When he describes those nuns of Constantinople who were torn from the altar by the conquering Turks, “with naked bosoms, outstretched hands, and disheveled hair,” he cannot refrain from commenting that “we should piously believe that few could be tempted to prefer the vigils of the harem to those of the monastery.”¹² When he recalls that he has somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot—“My vow of poverty has given me a hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince”—he cannot stop there, but must add: “I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.”¹³

It is, of course, no accident that Gibbon's wit is so frequently directed at Christianity and its adherents. The same “arms of ridicule and comic raillery”¹⁴ which Constantine employed against the heretics, Gibbon employed against the Christians. One of his aims in the Decline and Fall was to capture the territory of early church history for the secular historian. In order to accomplish that aim, it was not enough—at least it was not enough for Gibbon—to put fact in place of fancy. The miraculous had to be ridiculed as well as questioned. And this he proceeded to do, with a mastery of literary devices designed both to infuriate the orthodox and to delight and titillate his fellow skeptics.

C'est le ton qui fait la musique. By no means the least effective of those devices was the tone of mock seriousness which Gibbon was able to assume at will when he dealt with sacred matters. From the beginning of chapter 15, when he complains about “the melancholy duty” imposed on the historian who “must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which [religion] contracted in a long residence upon earth,” to its end, when he records in a matter-of-fact manner that during the age of Christ, his Apostles, and their first disciples, “the lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the Church,”¹⁵ that tone reinforces the secular implications of the five “secondary causes” for the rapid growth of Christianity. The Old Testament is not immune. After quoting from Numbers 14:11—“How long will this people provoke me? and how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs which I have shown among them?”—Gibbon assures his readers that it would be easy, “but it would be unbecoming,” to justify the complaint of the Deity from the whole tenor of the Mosaic history. After noting that there exist some objections against the authority of Moses and the prophets which too readily present themselves to the skeptical mind, he feels bound to add that these “can only be derived from our ignorance of remote antiquity, and from our incapacity to form an adequate judgment of the Divine economy.”¹⁶

That tone of voice is not confined to chapter 15. It reappears at the conclusion of the second of the “Christian” chapters, where the observation that the Christians in the course of their intestine dissensions have inflicted far graver severities on each other than they have experienced from the zeal of the infidels is called “a melancholy truth which obtrudes itself on the reluctant mind”;¹⁷ and, later, in Gibbon's account of the monastic saints: “They familiarly accosted, or imperiously commanded, the lions and serpents of the desert; infused vegetation into a sapless trunk; suspended iron on the surface of the water; passed the Nile on the back of a crocodile; and refreshed themselves in a fiery furnace.”¹⁸ More difficult feats, certainly, than those of the Empress Eudocia. All she did was to enjoy the conscious satisfaction of returning to Constantinople “with the chains of St. Peter, the right arm of St. Stephen, and an undoubted picture of the Virgin painted by St. Luke.”¹⁹ Hardly ever can a “melancholy duty” have been performed in a more sprightly fashion.

Part of the humor all along resides in the sort of persona that Gibbon presents to his readers, in the disjunction between the skeptical man of the world and the mask of credulity and devotion which he so readily assumes. Throughout the Decline and Fall, there is carried on a benevolent conspiracy between the reader and the historian, carefully engineered by the latter, who uses it to entertain his audience as well as to take it into camp. Gibbon is ever present. “Before we enter upon the memorable reign of that prince [Diocletian],” he writes, “it will be proper to punish and dismiss the unworthy brother of Numerian.”²⁰ Later, he confesses that “I have neither power nor inclination to follow the Hungarians beyond the Rhine.”²¹ Concluding his sketch of Muhammad's life, he admits how difficult it is to decide whether to call him an enthusiast or an impostor: “At the distance of twelve centuries I darkly contemplate his shade through a cloud of religious incense.”²²

As the history draws to a close, the historian increasingly mocks himself. The feudal knight, he tells us, devoted himself to speaking the truth as the champion of God and the ladies—and adds, parenthetically, that “I blush to write such discordant names.”²³ Before remarking that even in this world the natural order of events sometimes affords strong appearances of moral retribution, he solemnly announces: “I shall not, I trust, be accused of superstition.”²⁴ And, as he takes leave of the papacy in the sixteenth century, he has some praise even for the temporal government of that institution. “For myself,” he movingly declares, “it is my wish to depart in charity with all mankind, nor am I willing, in these last moments, to offend even the Pope and clergy of Rome.”²⁵

The reader acts throughout as the historian's good-humored accomplice—civilized, impatient of too much detail, and not averse to a little mockery of himself. “In the course of this history,” Gibbon writes, “the most voracious appetite for war will be abundantly satiated.”²⁶ But that is not really what the reader wants. For after quoting the stern Tertullian on what will happen at the Last Judgment—“so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ; so many tragedians, more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers—” here the historian breaks off in mid-passage, in the belief that “the humanity of the reader will permit me to draw a veil over the rest of this infernal description, which the zealous African pursues in a long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms.”²⁷ Gibbon's readers are generous as well as humane. If, in his Anecdotes, Procopius insinuates that “the fame and even the virtue of Belisarius were polluted by the lust and cruelty of his wife,” and that the hero deserved “an appellation which may not drop from the pen of the decent historian,” that is something which “the generous reader” will confess only reluctantly, having cast away the libel and been persuaded only by the evidence of the facts.²⁸ The reader's attention is apt to wander, especially when it comes to the deliberations of Church councils. In the treaty between the Greek and the Latin churches, “it was agreed,” so Gibbon writes, “that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, as from one principle and one substance; that he proceeds by the Son, being of the same nature and substance; and that he proceeds from the Father and the Son, by one spiration, and production.” After the word “agreed,” the historian felt it incumbent upon him to insert the phrase, “I must entreat the attention of the reader.”²⁹ Faced with such an entreaty, few of his readers would be so hardhearted as to withhold their attention, and few would fail to forgive Gibbon for using his appeal to them for his own sly ends.

But where his humor is concerned, one must not make too much of Gibbon's polemical intentions, sly or otherwise. His irony, it has been pointed out, could serve many purposes: it could be used as a weapon; it could provide the requisite distance between himself and his subject matter, and thus lend the appearance of Olympian detachment to his history; it could act as a useful protective device in an age when explicit attacks on the essentials of Christian faith and doctrine still held a certain amount of danger; it could help to mediate an amused and objective view of human nature in all its (sometimes paradoxical) variety; it could also help the historian to evade judgments where he did not wish to make them. Gibbon's sneer was not always good-humored, and has even been seen by some as an outlet for his aggressions. But, granted all that, it is still worth remarking that there is in him a playfulness, a gaiety, a delight in wit for its own sake, that bubbles up time and again, irrepressibly. Like Julian, he “could not always restrain the levity of his temper.”³⁰ Take the Armoricans, for instance. Armorica was the Roman name for the maritime counties of Gaul between the Seine and the Loire; whenever he comes to deal with the inhabitants of that region, Gibbon cannot resist verbal allusions to events taking place in his own time in certain other provinces. And so we hear of the Armoricans “in a state of disorderly independence”; of “the slight foundations of the Armorican republic”; of the Bretons of Armorica refusing their customary tribute; and of liberty peopling “the morasses of Armorica.”³¹

Other forms of verbal wit abound in the Decline and Fall, some taken over from his sources, some of his own making: “A swarm of monks” issues from the desert; Julian's beard, louse-infested, earns the right to be called “populous”; pursuit of religious controversy affords a new occupation to “the busy idleness” of Constantinople; Roman senators complete their ruin “by an expensive effort to disguise their poverty”; Simeon Stylites spends thirty years on his column, “this last and lofty station.”³² Boswell had found spring guns and man-traps in Gibbon's garden of flowery eloquence. How the historian must have enjoyed setting them! Here is one: “‘May those who divide Christ be divided with the sword, may they be hewn in pieces, may they be burned alive!’ were the charitable wishes of a Christian synod.”³³ Here is another: “He [Justinian] piously labored to establish with fire and sword the unity of the Christian faith.”³⁴ And here is a third: The Syracusans had held out for more than twenty days against the Arab besiegers; “and the place might have been relieved, if the mariners of the Imperial fleet had not been detained at Constantinople in building a church to the Virgin Mary.”³⁵

It may be argued, of course, that the last three examples combine high spirits with the censure of Christian hypocrisy. That particular form of censure could not be passed by Gibbon, or anyone else, upon the learned Origen, who, eager for perpetual chastity, “judged it the most prudent to disarm the tempter.” Here the historian's gloss is sympathetic rather than critical: “As it was his general practice to allegorise Scripture, it seems unfortunate that, in this instance only, he should have adopted the literal sense.”³⁶ Gibbon's wit was not tied to his polemical sallies, even when it accompanied them. When he remarks, “But there is a Providence (such at least was the opinion of the historian Procopius) that watches over innocence and folly,”³⁷ he is less concerned with disabusing his readers of a providential interpretation of history than with making a good joke. And the same sense of mischievous fun impels him to quote Malaterra to the effect that the bite of the tarantula “provokes a windy disposition, quae per anum inhoneste crepitando emergit—a symptom most ridiculously felt by the whole Norman army in their camp near Palermo.”³⁸

Is that, then, all there is to Gibbon's humor—footnoted reprimands for delinquent authors, sexual innuendo, solemn sneers at religion, amusing games played with his readers, and, throughout, an irrepressible element of playfulness and sheer high spirits? Let us look at a few more examples, and try to establish what, besides possibly exhibiting one or the other of the qualities already adverted to, they may have in common:

Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.³⁹

Such folly was disdained and indulged by the wisest princes.⁴⁰

Strangers and pilgrims who already felt the strong intoxication of fanaticism, and, perhaps, of wine.⁴¹

… the sacred but licentious crowd of priests, of inferior ministers, and of female dancers.⁴²

… some resemblance may be found in the situation of two princes who conquered France by their valor, their policy, and the merits of a seasonable conversion.⁴³

… the Romans invited the Huns to a splendid, or, at least, a plentiful supper.⁴⁴

By the repetition of a sentence and the loss of a foreskin, the subject or the slave, the captive or the criminal, arose in a moment the free and equal companions of the victorious Moslems.⁴⁵

In these examples the humor arises in large part from Gibbon's undercutting the abstract, the spiritual, the unworldly, the formal, the pompous, the pretentious, the merely verbal, with the concrete, the mundane, the down-to-earth, the reality as he sees it. That same attitude characterizes a good many of his epigrams:

It is easier to deplore the fate, than to describe the actual condition, of Corsica.⁴⁶

Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty. …⁴⁷

It is much easier to ascertain the appetites of a quadruped than the speculations of a philosopher.⁴⁸

What is involved, of course, is a particular view of human existence—cynical, realistic, disdainful of cant and hypocrisy. It assumes that human beings everywhere and at all times share a desire for power, for material gain, and for pleasure, a desire they might be able to control to a certain extent by exercising a rational prudence, but which resists idealistic or suprarational efforts (however well-intentioned) to extirpate it. One is reminded of La Rochefoucauld's maxim: “Les vertus se perdent dans l'intérêt comme les fleuves se perdent dans la mer.” True wisdom resides in those who can rebuff or rid themselves of chimerical dreams and are able to adopt instead an unvarnished view of human character and a utilitarian view of social and political institutions. Those who refuse to do this, who let themselves be misled by the idle speculations of poets or priests, or chastise themselves in the vain hope of denying their natural proclivities, become the object of Gibbon's amusement as well as of his censure.

Thus Julian “gradually acquired for his troops the imaginary protection of the gods, and for himself the firm and effective support of the Roman legions.”⁴⁹ Thus the attachment of the Roman soldiers to their standards was inspired to some extent by the united influence of religion and honor. But “these motives, which derived their strength from the imagination, were enforced by fears and hopes of a more substantial kind.”⁵⁰ Two adverse choirs chanted the Trisagion in the cathedral of Constantinople; “and, when their lungs were exhausted, they had recourse to the more solid arguments of sticks and stones.”⁵¹ After the failure of the line of Alaric, royal dignity was still limited to the pure and noble blood of the Goths: “The clergy, who anointed their lawful prince, always recommended, and sometimes practised, the duty of allegiance.”⁵² “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.”⁵³

Gibbon's sympathies clearly lie with the magistrate. He would surely have agreed with Lord Melbourne's complaint that things had come to a pretty pass when religion was allowed to invade private life, though he might have added, “and to evade public life.” It was, after all, the withdrawal of the early Christians from civic duty and responsibility that contributed to Rome's fall. This is one serious message of the Christian chapters. As we have observed, their comic effect lies, in part, in the mock solemnity of the author's tone. But only in part. For the same view of human nature which informs the work as a whole informs these chapters as well, and it is there, as elsewhere, integrally related to Gibbon's center of levity:

Disdaining an ignominious flight, the virgins of the warm climate of Africa encountered the enemy in the closest engagement: they permitted priests and deacons to share their beds, and gloried amidst the flames in their unsullied purity. But insulted Nature sometimes vindicated her rights, and this new species of martyrdom served only to introduce a new scandal into the church.⁵⁴

“Insulted nature” here represents the sexual passion which will not let itself be entirely repressed. Elsewhere, it is the desire for pecuniary gain that resists curbing: “Even the reverses of the Greek and Roman coins were frequently of an idolatrous nature. Here, indeed, the scruples of the Christian were suspended by a stronger passion.”⁵⁵ Men, in Gibbon's view, crave material rewards, and those who claim to despise these more likely than not are able to make that claim because they cannot, in fact, obtain them: “It is always easy, as well as agreeable, for the inferior ranks of mankind to claim a merit from the contempt of the pomp and pleasure which fortune has placed beyond their reach.”⁵⁶ Cyprian “had renounced those temporal honors which it is probable he would never have obtained.”⁵⁷

In these examples the humor arises from a tacitly assumed agreement between the historian and his reader that there must be something irrational, something almost demented, certainly something comical, about a religion that expected men to renounce carnal desires and worldly success. As for miraculous intervention, one story told by Gibbon and his comment on it can stand for many others of a similar kind:

The victorious king of the Franks [Clovis] proceeded without delay to the siege of Angoulême. At the sound of his trumpets the walls of the city imitated the example of Jericho, and instantly fell to the ground; a splendid miracle, which may be reduced to the supposition that some clerical engineers had secretly undermined the foundations of the rampart.⁵⁸

Here, as elsewhere, practical common sense triumphs over the miraculous; the engineer (even if, this time, he be a clerical engineer) over the priest. And the reader is meant to smile. But what Gibbon has in mind is more than mere entertainment, more, even, than yet another lighthearted blow at the truth or efficacy of Christian miracles. The ground bass of practicality and common sense that resounds in so much of his humor both echoes and sustains one of the major themes of the Decline and Fall: that the past and future progress of civilization rest not on the unbridled abstractions of speculators or the vain incantations of priests and poets, but rather on the slow and steady conquests of science and the practical arts.

That theme is to be found throughout the work. But it is in the “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West”⁵⁹ that Gibbon proclaims it with the greatest eloquence. Here he ascribes the end of the barbarian incursions, “the long repose,” not to a decrease of population, but to the progress of arts and agriculture. From an abject condition of savagery—naked both in mind and body, destitute of laws, arts, ideas, and almost of language, man has gradually arisen to command the animals, to fertilize the earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure the heavens. It may safely be presumed that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.

Gibbon then proceeds to view the improvements of society under a threefold aspect: Poets and philosophers first—but their superior powers of reason or fancy are rare and spontaneous productions. The benefits of law and policy, trade and manufactures, arts and sciences come second—but that complex machinery may be decayed by time, or injured by violence. But, fortunately for mankind, the more useful, or at least the more necessary, arts are in no such danger.

Each village, each family, each individual, must always possess both ability and inclination to perpetuate the use of fire and of metals; the propagation and service of domestic animals; the methods of hunting and fishing; the rudiments of navigation; the imperfect cultivation of corn or other nutritive grain; and the simple practice of the mechanic trades. Private genius and public industry may be extirpated; but these hardy plants survive the tempest, and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil.⁶⁰

It is true, as Gibbon goes on to point out, that since these practical arts were first discovered, religious zeal, as well as war and commerce, has helped to diffuse them among the savages of the Old and the New World. But they are more than the sum of those agents of diffusion. They are nothing less than the bedrock of civilization. Useful and practical, they stand in no need of elaborate speculations and feverish imaginings. They correspond in their steady and constant operation to the happy mean of human nature, free from extremes of virtue and vice, solidly based on a recognition of reality. That is one of the great lessons of the Decline and Fall. And when the reader laughs and smiles with the historian at the excesses and absurdities of misguided men and women, be they pagan, Christian, or Muslim, he shows that he has learned his lesson. By his laughter and his smile he is helping to support the foundations of Gibbon's own rampart.

Notes

1. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (DF), Everyman's Library Edition, 6 vols. (London, 1910; reprinted, 1966), chap. 58, p. 48. All subsequent references are to chapter and page of this edition.

2. DF, chap. 19, p. 204.

3. DF, chap. 23, p. 395.

4. DF, chap. 69, p. 471.

5. DF, chap. 51, p. 313.

6. DF, chap. 1, p. 27.

7. DF, chap. 26, p. 1; chap. 51, p. 357; chap. 28, p. 143; chap. 46, p. 503.

8. DF, chap. 40, p. 155.

9. DF, chap. 27, p. 112.

10. DF, chap. 3, p. 76; chap. 21, p. 273.

11. DF, chap. 7, p. 171.

12. DF, chap. 68, pp. 448-49.

13. DF, chap. 37, p. 14.

14. DF, chap. 21, p. 285.

15. DF, chap. 15, pp. 430, 499.

16. Ibid., pp. 434, 441.

17. DF, chap. 16, p. 68.

18. DF, chap. 37, p. 19.

19. DF, chap. 32, p. 317.

20. DF, chap. 12, p. 339.

21. DF, chap. 55, p. 517.

22. DF, chap. 50, p. 272.

23. DF, chap. 58, p. 56.

24. DF, chap. 62, p. 239.

25. DF, chap. 70, p. 546.

26. DF, chap. 39, pp. 120-1.

27. DF, chap. 15, p. 457.

28. DF, chap. 41, p. 273.

29. DF, chap. 66, p. 374.

30. DF, chap. 22, p. 340.

31. DF, chap. 35, p. 407; chap. 38, pp. 52, 93, 100.

32. DF, chap. 21, p. 310; chap. 22, p. 349; chap. 27, p. 75; chap. 36, p. 437; chap. 37, p. 18.

33. DF, chap. 47, p. 27.

34. Ibid., p. 41.

35. DF, chap. 52, pp. 421-22.

36. DF, chap. 15, p. 467.

37. DF, chap. 31, p. 249.

38. DF, chap. 56, p. 560.

39. DF, chap. 1, p. 1.

40. DF, chap. 40, p. 161.

41. DF, chap. 28, p. 146.

42. DF, chap. 23, p. 373.

43. DF, chap. 38, p. 53.

44. DF, chap. 34, p. 362.

45. DF, chap. 51, p. 377.

46. DF, chap. 1, p. 27.

47. DF, chap. 21, p. 300.

48. DF, chap. 26, p. 3.

49. DF, chap. 23, p. 379.

50. DF, chap. 1, p. 11.

51. DF, chap. 47, p. 35.

52. DF, chap. 38, p. 86.

53. DF, chap. 2, p. 29.

54. DF, chap. 15, p. 467.

55. Ibid., p. 446.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., p. 483.

58. DF, chap. 38, p. 60.

59. Ibid., pp. 103-12.

60. Ibid., p. 111. See Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Other Selections (New York, 1963), p. xxix, for the suggestion that the interplay between the history of empires and the history of the sciences provides the constant theme of the Decline and Fall.